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Astronauts Throw Trash Into Space
MattSparkes writes "The International Space Station is home to an increasing amount of unwanted goods, and NASA has just approved a policy where these could be thrown out of the door into space. 'Tools and other gear have accidentally floated away during spacewalks. But NASA has shied away from intentionally jettisoning gear off the ISS in the past because of the threat of space junk hitting the station or other spacecraft.' The loosening of the rules on this comes just as Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin is about to take a space walk where he will hit a golf ball from the ISS in a promotional stunt for a golf company."
It starts with a piece of trash and quickly turns into a terrible neighborhood. Next thing you know, it'll be the International Space Crackhouse.
I told you we shouldn't have let those Russians in.
and criminal.
They could pack their trash and, with minimal thrust, send it on a quick reentry path in which it will burn in higher atmosphere a few days or weeks later. On the other hand, if they just dump things at random, they may be their own victims mounthes to years later.
What about installing a device to eject garbage in the direction of the earth, so that they will be burned in the atmosphere as this would also help the ISS to maintain altitude. I realize that the effect would be minimal, but yet all small things might help. Anyway ejecting materials towards is always better than just let them float away.
... after all, one man's trash is another man's treasure (if you believe that saying). I know of a number of people who would pay what I consider to be a fair sum of money just to own something that had been _in space_.
Joking aside, how hard would it be to double-bag a few trash bags and keep the trash outside until a convenient "recovery" mission could come around?
Wait, when did they stop throwing trash into space to begin with?
Just my 2 cents.. Ok, first the Russians send tourists in to space.. and now do ads/stunts that may have an impact on the ISS? I know it is done on "their time" but doesn't this still impact you other members of the international crew? Its one small step towards all out anarchy!
If you know what happens to the jettisoned object, it's a fine policy. I understand that, after being pushed in the back direction from the station (i.e. behind it in the orbit), junk gets slowed down by whatever thin extent of athmosphere is at this attitude, and burns up in the atmosphere un a matter of days or weeks. The article also says that larger and denser objects may take longer before burn up, but they can be tracked by the ground stations (do they use radars?). If this outcome can be made predictable and the range of possible orbits before burn up is known, there is no problem then.
17779 eligible voters in a district, 17779 'vote' as one. This is Russia.
Quite apart from the obvious dangers involved in dumping trash into orbit ...
ISS trash isn't actually trash --- it's extremely valuable material (and mass) that has been boosted into LEO at very high cost.
They should attach an extensible trash module to the ISS, and place all their "trash" (which simply means stuff that they cannot currently use) into the containers through appropriate hatches.
(And I bet space contractors would love to bid for such a project too.)
Not only would you reduce the risk to future flights this way, but you would also provide useful materials for the future. *AND* you'd be seen to be environmentally sensitive, which is no bad thing.
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There was this anime (PlanetES) where space trash caused a horrible shuttle accident resulting in everyone dying. While it is an anime, I wonder if it could become true sometime in the future with all the crap left over floating in space, what are the possibilities of, say, a screw flying into a sensitive part of the rocket or cracking a window, etc?
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ISS observation deck window smashed when a frozen Hulk Grogan jettisoned from the ISS a few months earlier caught up with the ISS and smashed through the observation window. Leaves three astronauts severely smelly and in lack of air.
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That would give a decent velocity to aim the stuff at earth so that it would burn up, and hopefully not end up in a high elliptical orbit.
Plus it's re-usable and it's kind of cool.
..........FULL STOP.
Futurama's prediction is coming coming true, it didn't work out so well for them..
/ episode/1541/summary.html
http://www.tv.com/futurama/a-big-piece-of-garbage
EDIT: My image verification for this post is 'brothel'....
What if the second garbage ball returns to Earth like the first one did?
Who cares? That won't be for hundreds of years.
Exactly! It's none of our concern.
Good point, considering how much useful stuff is regularly acquired and recycled from plain old Earth dumpsters.
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I mean, if they make sure that they pack everything safely together so that it doesn't generate small particles, and if they give it a push towards earth I don't see a problem.
By the way, I was wondering if it is possible to use a big bag of foam or gel, to sweep up small pieces of debris that could damage satellites or space stations.
> ISS trash isn't actually trash --- it's extremely valuable material (and mass) that has been boosted into LEO at very high cost.
Unfortunately, most of it has been processed through astronaut intestines.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Just as I thought the station itself would if they didn't boost the altitude from time to time.
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Pigs. Litterbugs. Someone ought to fine them $500. What can you say?
But... after all... one of the pivotal episodes in Arthur C. Clarke's 1952 novel "Islands in the Sky" concerns an orbital spacecraft which is alarmed by the presence of a large, unidentified spacecraft, approach closely enough to identify it, and sees that it's covered in radiation symbols. In the novel, it turns out that the AEC had, at one time, had the bright idea of disposing of radioactive waste by shooting it into space, and this is a stray canister of high-level radioactive waste. So I guess it could be worse.
And "throwing away" (such an aptly descriptive phrase: just toss the waste a discrete distance from the dwelling) seems to be a basic part of human nature. In Owen Wister's novel, "The Virginian," set in Wyoming between 1874 and 1890, the narrator and his companions partake of "Sardines... and potted chicken, and devilled ham," and muses:
"But portable ready-made food plays of necessity a great part in the opening of a new country. These picnic pots and cans were the first of her trophies that Civilization dropped upon Wyoming's virgin soil. The cow-boy is now gone to worlds invisible; the wind has blown away the white ashes of his camp-fires; but the empty sardine box lies rusting over the face of the Western earth."
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Actually most Progress modules are used for this - they are loaded with trash before being detatched and deorbited, burning up on reentry but theres no particular reason they couldnt be placed into a parking orbit for potential future use.
Calm down, little buddy. The environmental impact of the material jettisoned from the ISS is minimal compared with the pollution produced by the average small American town. The "environment" is great and all, and it shouldn't be altered irresponsibly, but let's keep those knees from jerking, eh?
Love,
AC
Interesting world where 'trash' can be defined as "stuff that we paid $10,000/lb to get up here, but we don't need anymore".
-Styopa
The premise of Planetes (a.k.a. Trashmen in Space) is that so much garbage will be put into orbit around Earth that it becomes dangerous to space traffic and we will need a dedicated "Space Debris" division to control it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetes
And so, it begins.
Actually, before flinging the trash into space they created a giant trash barge. It sailed around the world for years but no country would take it. Now they're hurling the garbage into space. It might come back, but there's no need to worry about that because it wouldn't happen for another thousand years or so...
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In orbit, velocity and altitude are related. If you "speed up," your altitude increases; if you "slow down," your altitude decreases. That part is "math" and is not negotiable or subject to interpretation.
If you eject some mass (tools, trash, frozen excrement, etc) in the direction opposite to your current velocity vector, you'll speed up and increase altitude, and the reaction mass will slow down, taking a lower altitude. That eliminates most of the recontact issues, and is why NASA said what they did. It may not be immediately obvious, but throwing anything "at the earth" or in any direction other than the V- direction runs the risk of recontact. If you toss something overboard in a plane perpendicular to your velocity vector, you'll maximize the recontact probability - the reaction mass will come back at you every half-orbit.
If you eliminate the atmospheric drag and orbital perturbations, all mass ejections have a potential for recontact. Fortunately, we don't have "ideal" conditions, so we can use the atmospheric drag to our benefit (one of very few situations where it's actually a good thing) and make a system like this work. I'd much rather see the Trash Chucker 2000 used to eliminate the "waste" materials than to have to schedule an extra Progress or Shuttle mission just to go collect the garbage.
Someone needs to contact the Internetional Space Station HomwOwners Association as I'm sure this is against the covenents ...
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... just get Adam Quark to pick it up?
Here bee, bee, bee, bee. Here bee, bee, bee, bee.
"ISS in a promotional stunt for a golf company."
Contest - Program "Canada Arm", first one to hit a ball into a stationary orbit wins!
Temporary satellites... connect the garbage to a conductive tether. Traveling through Earth's magnetic field, the device generates electricity. How to use it? Temporary communications, cool bright light, whatever. Just use the power. The price of the power is reduction in momentum, and eventually the whole thing falls low enough for atmospheric drag to take it down. A lot of money was spent putting energy into the stuff by orbiting it, now lets at least extract some of the energy from it.
I am just sitting here at work, minding my own business when all of the sudden Iced Egg-Nog Latte reaches escape velocity from my nose!
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
Unfortunately, most of it has been processed through astronaut intestines.
And that has it's uses too. If they ever decide to experiment with greenhouses in space (or on the moon or whatever) sterilizing that shit (pun intended) could conceivably be cheaper than bringing up dirt and fertilizer from earth. They would have to get over the psychological factor of knowing where your space tomatoes came from though, but since the water already is recycled from human "byproducs" that are already dealing with that.
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"10 Years of Frozen Astronaut Shit and Piss From the ISS."
Only the shit. The piss is recycled to become water. This is one of the less romantic aspects of humanity's great quest into space.
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Man, bring this stuff back down on the space shuttle and run it on ebay. I bet some one would pay for a collection of tools used on the ISS!
They may be able to recoup some of the cost... lol
Right. It's really about like the waste generated by a small business like an auto shop...or maybe 3-4 American families.
And considering that they're talking about jettisoning maybe a few hundred pounds per year, when several thousand tons of micrometeoroids enter the atmosphere and burn up each day, we're not even looking at a pitance here.
all aliens have to do now is scoop the discarded feces from orbit and extract the blood (all feces contains blood) in order to extract dna/genes. They can then clone asstronauts err speak prime-humans (specialists) and send them down in place of the real ones when the real ones return for the tenth time.
Why am I now filled with the un-deletable image of Spock, crying in front of flotsam?
These ISS guys, next thing you know, they'll have broken-down space shuttles cluttering up their yard.
"There goes the neigborhood."
Actually, even human waste could have value if stored properly. From adding more inertia to the station (a double edged sword) to resist orbital drag, to a mass barrier around critical components (including the astronauts) as protection from orbital debris and radiation.
Or to put it another way, in Soviet ISS, your crap saves you.
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They should attach an extensible trash module to the ISS
Like they're gonna spend money to launch trash containers.
ISS trash isn't actually trash --- it's extremely valuable material (and mass) that has been boosted into LEO at very high cost.
Every ounce you launch into orbit has a cost, and the extremely valuable materials you're talking about are not valuable anymore once they're considered trash and dumped in space. It's not because you put millions into something that it will always be worth millions, it's not by spending thousands of dollars on sending energy cereal bars to space that the resulting litter is worth anything.
You just got troll'd!
From adding more inertia to the station (a double edged sword) to resist orbital drag
Useless, since it would work against you when you would thrust in order to compensate atmospheric drag (not orbital drag).
as protection from orbital debris and radiation
Try protecting yourself from debris that go so fast that they do 10 times the damage you'd do with a bullet shot from a .357 Magnum with compressed packages of energy cereal bars and human crap, or whatever they mean by trash. Same with radiation, it would be about as helpful as unrolling rolls of toilet paper around the Space Shuttle to protect it better during atmospheric re-entry.
By the way, were you really being serious, I mean, do you realize how ridiculous it all sounded?
You just got troll'd!
This article has good descriptions of the types of stuff being thrown out. Also a picure that shows just how bad the problem is. Trash is stored all over the ISS, reducing the room for real work and making non-trash hard to find! http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/2006-06 -26-clutter-iss_x.htm
Source: USA Today 6/27/2006 2:57 PM ET
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Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin is about to take a space walk where he will hit a golf ball from the ISS
Either that, or he will hit the ISS and send himself flying. Stay tuned!
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Just wait til they have commercials featuring a crying Native American in a spacesuit urging people not to liter in space.
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The astronauts have to exercise anyway, maybe they could come up with the exercise catapult for the trash launcher. Something perhaps where they had to wind a spring or bend it or something, ye olden roman engineering deal, load up the space d00dz fertilizer and old junk and FLING!! With all the appropriate mathematical calculations, etc,of course, to make sure it heads towards a faster de-orbit.
How long till Mr. Hankey leaves a skid mark on a Hubble lens?
There's nothing orbitting lower than the ISS except a few spy sats and a few ham radio sats. Oh, and of course, the shuttle. All of the important birds are in higher orbits. Thus spake The Internet
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Well, don't forget that you're in orbit. The ISS, and therefore the waste, is travelling at 7.7 kilometers per second, and you're throwing it at a mere 0.009 km/s. Let's assume that the ISS takes two hours to make one orbit. Also, let's assume that when you throw the waste directly at the Earth, coincidentally you are throwing it in the direction of Betelgeuse. Now, the 0.009 km/s is not going to change the orbit that much, so in half an hour the trash is a quarter of the way around the Earth, and your toss (although still towards Betelgeuse) is now parallel to the surface of the Earth, and increasing the orbital velocity. Half an hour later, the direction of your toss, while still towards Betelgeuse, is now pointing away from the Earth, and back towards the ISS. Essentially, this will cancel out most of the Earthward travel you gained in the first place. By the third half hour, your toss (still heading towards Betelgeuse) is now heading backwards along the orbital path, cancelling out the gains of an hour ago. By the time you've gone one orbit, all of the effects of your toss have basically cancelled each other out.
Basically, if you start with a circular orbit, and add a small velocity, you wind up with a slightly elliptical orbit.
Although you are correct that a smaller orbit means a faster orbit, the bit that you're missing is that a smaller orbit also means dipping lower into the atmosphere (it may be practically a vacuum at the ISS's orbit, but it is still there.) and thus increasing the atmospheric drag. Eventually the atmospheric drag saps the trash's momentum, and it deorbits.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
if we throw junk into space, won't there be the possiblity we infect other planets? :)
I know it's very hard to escape the gravitational pull of the earth and even harder to escape the solar system, but what would happen when some extremophiles get a lift on our junk and plunge in some planet ?
a few later we'll send some beagle to the place and whaddayaknow... it'll find life
So concern about pollution is now considered trolling?
fuck you america
SURELY NOT!!!!!
Yes, I was serious. But it's so ridiculous sounding, it'll never be done. There have been proposals to build refuge modules to use as a bunker in the even of solar storms or potential debris fields hitting the station. For high velocity debris, loose stuff like trash works very well. Similar effect to the thin bumpers used on the outside. For radiation, the proposal is to use water or plastic (organic molecules). Seems that sewage would fit the bill there too. All it takes is a "can within a can" design. Disgusting, but beneficial.
As far as dealing with atmospheric drag, you were pointing out the down side of what I meant by the double edged sword. But the up side is to increase the time between boosts. Theoretically that shouldn't be needed. Pessimistically, it is. With the space shuttle being retired, there goes a boost method. It wouldn't take many snafus before you'd start missing a timely boost. Is the extra mass of fuel for a boost worth it? Maybe, maybe not. But if that mass is useful in other ways, maybe.
But mostly it's just funny to think of using human waste as something functional. Chill out and laugh.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.